It is 1978, and in the USA ultralight aviation is sweeping all before it, as one innovative design after another leaves the drawing board and takes to the air, proving that tube and Dacron technology has finally come of age. Construction of Klaus Hill's V-tailed 'Hummer', which made its first flight in November 1977, began in earnest and gave Klaus a place amongst the cream of American pioneers, particularly when he followed it with the 'Humbug', on which the 'Vector' and many other designs were modelled. Sadly, like many other aviation pioneers, he gained his experience in the hardest possible way, being killed during a test flight on 10 October 1979.

Then there was the composite-construction Striplin 'Flac' which took its name from 'Foot Launched Air Cycle', a reflection of the early American legislation requiring ultralights to be foot-launched if they were to be exempt from lightplane rules. Right from the start, Ken Striplin intended his 'Flac' to incorporate an undercarriage, but he pretended it was an auxiliary one, to get round the legislation.

Different control systems and configurations abounded. Ultralite Soaring's 'Wizard' suspended its pilot in a harness between the tubes of the cage, but also had an elevator. Others, like the Ultralight Flight's 'Mirage', used a cruciform tail with elevators and rudder, with spoilers on top of the wing. Still others used ruddervators on an inverted V-tail, where the ailerons improve their efficiency, as is the case with the Ultraflight Sales 'Lazair' from Canada. The choice was growing almost by the hour.

This was the year, too, when John Chotia's efforts finally came good, his first two prototypes of the two-axis 'Weedhopper' making their maiden flights in February 1978. Carrying the type number 'JC-24', as they were his 24th design, they led to a pre-production machine the following year and large-scale production in 1980.

Tragically, only one year later, on 27 October 1981, Chotia followed in Hill's footsteps and was killed while test flying one of his own machines. We remember him as a big good-natured man with strict morals (even when in France he wouldn't taste the wine!), but farsighted enough to see that ultralight aviation had to turn to research into small engines. Even though his own single-cylinder Chotia 460 was notoriously unreliable, he was nevertheless the first person to create an engine specifically for ultralight use. While his engineering was questionable, his grasp of history certainly wasn't: he realised that he was taking part in an aviation rebirth, and shortly before he died confessed to having been largely inspired by Santos-Dumont's 'Demoiselle'.

By comparison, Europe was pretty quiet, and undoubtedly the major event of the year was the first successful crossing of the English Channel by microlight, when on 9 May Dave Cook (later to found CFM) took a 'VJ-23E' across to France. Like Chotia, he too had a sense of history, landing near the spot from where Bleriot had started his first ever crossing, 69 years earlier. He'd taken 1 h 15 min to fly from Deal in Kent to Les Baraques in northern France, much longer than Bleriot's 37 minutes but without the benefit of the extra 15 hp provided by the Frenchman's Anzani.